How Elephants Walk

When sharing videos of the sanctuary residents, we often receive questions about their gaits, particularly about Rana and Mara. You may have noticed that Mara has an old permanent injury to her right front wrist, affecting her walk, and Rana has a fused elbow from a childhood injury which makes her gait quite noticeable as well. For today’s EleFact, we want to look a bit closer at elephant limbs and movement. 

The limbs of an elephant are positioned directly under their body with their bones stacked on top of one another in order to best support their weight. Their front leg joints bend backwards, like the wrists of humans, which is the opposite of most other four-legged mammals. Their back legs are slightly longer than the front, but their high shoulders make the front limbs look longer. The back legs have knees with kneecaps.

Their limbs, and bodies in general, are built to move: we know that some elephants will walk hundreds of miles for food and water, and their anatomical makeup helps with that. The bones of an elephant’s limbs are long and spongy and made up of small, needle-like pieces of bone arranged like a honeycomb (instead of hollow parts that contain bone marrow). This allows for stronger bones while still promoting blood cell production. Both the front and back limbs can support an elephant’s weight, although the front bears sixty percent. An elephant’s bones are much wider than most mammals, which gives them a thicker cross-sectional area and makes them more resistant to the type of stresses that can cause breaks.

As far as their gaits, elephants only have one, compared to horses, who have three. Although elephants can reach top speeds of 15 miles per hour, which would typically be considered a gallop, the elephants can not be considered as runners because their four feet do not ever leave the ground at one time.

Photo of Maia, who has a recognizable gait